VP, Product

Spare•Vancouver, BC

9d•Hybrid

About The Position

The VP of Product at Spare is a highly consequential role focused on building the complete product operating system. This system integrates market insights, customer input, AI leverage, and company strategy to produce high-quality products and achieve business results. The ideal candidate will have prior experience leading product in a similar environment, building and owning the operational machinery, navigating trade-offs under constraints, and demonstrating strong business outcomes. This role requires an AI-native mindset, both in theory and practice, and a keen judgment to consistently elevate product quality. The VP of Product will report to the co-founder and COO, serve as a member of the senior leadership team, and own the product function end-to-end, encompassing strategy, team management, execution, and outcomes. The position is based out of Spare's Vancouver HQ and operates on a hybrid model, requiring in-office presence on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Requirements

Proven leadership of a product organization at a comparable-stage B2B SaaS company, or full product ownership at a smaller startup where you truly had end-to-end responsibility
Deep, hands-on AI fluency: you have already built agentic workflows, AI-native products, or AI-leveraged development processes, not just studied them
Strong product taste and design judgment: you notice the details that others miss and you raise the quality bar consistently
Demonstrated ability to connect product strategy to business outcomes: revenue, retention, pricing, COGS, and competitive positioning
Evidence of building a product operating system, not just managing a team, but designing the machine that makes the team effective
Forward-thinking strategic instincts: you have made product bets before they were obvious and been right more often than not
Strong track record operating in imperfect, resource-constrained environments where you owned real tradeoffs
Exceptional communicator and cross-functional leader: you can align engineering, sales, customer success, and the executive team around a shared product direction

Responsibilities

Design and operate the full system through which product gets made at Spare: inputs, decision-making, prioritization, delivery, and feedback loops
Ensure the right information flows in from customers, sales, partner success, implementation, engineering, and data, and that it reaches the people who need it to make good decisions
Define what product owns versus what it influences, and hold those boundaries with clarity
Drive continuous improvement in product throughput, quality, and predictability without sacrificing strategic depth
Build a product organization that gets stronger, faster, and more effective over time
Own Spare's product vision and multi-year roadmap, setting direction across the full platform, not just individual product areas
Identify where the market is going before it is obvious and position Spare's product accordingly
Connect trends in AI, transit technology, user behaviour, regulatory shifts, and competitive dynamics into a coherent, defensible product strategy
Make bets before the evidence is fully assembled, and build the organizational confidence to act on them
Represent Spare's product vision externally with customers, prospects, partners, and the broader industry
Own product as a lever for revenue, retention, expansion, and competitive differentiation, not just feature delivery
Lead pricing and packaging strategy in partnership with Sales, Finance, and the CEO
Understand and actively manage the relationship between product decisions and COGS, implementation burden, services effort, and gross margin
Ensure product roadmap investment is clearly connected to company OKRs, ARR targets, and retention goals
Partner with Sales and Partner Success to ensure new capabilities land commercially and drive adoption at scale
Operate as the company's senior voice on how AI changes both the product itself and how product gets built
Drive adoption of agentic workflows, AI-assisted discovery, automated QA, and AI-powered internal tools across the product and engineering organization
Lead the external product strategy for AI, defining where AI becomes the interface, the automation layer, the copilot, or the agent within Spare's platform
Continuously re-architect product processes, surfaces, and team structures to take advantage of the AI development environment
Set the standard for what great product and design quality looks like at Spare, and hold it consistently across everything that ships
Develop strong taste and judgment within the product team through coaching, critique, and example
Partner closely with design leadership to ensure design quality is a first-order input, not a finishing layer
Say no to things that lower the bar, and create the organizational safety for the team to do the same
Recruit, develop, and retain a high-performing product organization
Build clear career paths, coaching frameworks, and performance expectations for PMs at every level
Create a culture of ownership, craft, and accountability, where people are energized by the work and proud of what they ship
Partner with People & Talent on headcount planning, leveling, and compensation strategy for the product function